News

Cavalcade of Authors celebrates its sixth year with 16 young adult writers

Posted Date: 3/11/2014

Published Mar. 9, 2014

By Ty Beaver, Tri-City Herald

Sixteen authors in the young adult genre will join more than
1,000 Mid-Columbia middle and high school students Friday for the
Cavalcade of Authors.

The annual writing conference for students
will celebrate its sixth year at Columbia Basin College. But visiting
authors won't limit themselves to CBC's Pasco campus during their stay.

The
event started as a reading program at Enterprise Middle School in West
Richland before growing to include students from eight districts.

Students
attend the event free of charge but are required to read books from at
least four of the authors at the conference in order to earn a spot.

Students then can choose from a number of seminars by each author and can also compete in a writing contest.

Other
students not attending the conference also will get a chance to hear
from some of the authors. Matt de la Pena, who's written We Were Here
and Ball Don't Lie, will visit with eighth-graders and their families at
Park Middle School on Wednesday night to talk about how he became a
writer. He'll also visit Pasco High School.

Andrew Smith, author
of Winger and The Marbury Lens, will spend the full day Thursday at
Phoenix High School working with students. It will be the first time the
school has had an author visit as part of the Cavalcade event.

Other authors will visit other schools throughout the Tri-Cities and beyond, including in Connell and Umatilla.

About
six schools usually receive visits from Cavalcade authors around the
time of the conference, said coordinator Michelle Lane. But the
organization instituted a new system this year where a donor could
designate a needy school to receive an author visit with a minimum
donation of $1,000, and the community responded positively.

Students
won't be the only ones with access to the writers. S.A. Bodeen, who
wrote The Compound and other books, will talk about her book at CBC on
Saturday night.

The Compound was selected as the Community Reads
book by the annual Mid-Columbia Literary Festival and hundreds of free
copies were distributed in the Tri-Cities.

While the community
reading projects is only one aspect of the festival's planned activities
for the year, organizers have said they selected Bodeen's
post-apocalyptic book so that all members of a family could read and
discuss it together.

And all the Cavalcade authors will be at
Barnes & Noble Bookstore at the Columbia Center mall from 5 to 6
p.m. Thursday for anyone wanting a book autographed.

Published with permission of the Tri-City Herald. Additional news stories can be accessed online at the Tri-City Herald.